Staplehouse

A heartbreaking restaurant of staggering genius

There’s a front door at Staplehouse, but you enter up the driveway and around back, as if you were visiting an old friend’s house. This freestanding brick building is home to a truly family-run restaurant. In the kitchen is Ryan Smith, who, prior to Staplehouse, played his part in the nationwide pimiento-cheese resurgence as the executive chef of Hugh Acheson’s Empire State South. Smith’s wife, Kara, is the general manager, and the restaurant fulfills the dream of her brother, chef Ryan Hidinger, who passed away before it came to fruition. Hidinger’s wife, Jen, runs the restaurant with them, as well as the Giving Kitchen, a charity for crisis-stricken restaurant workers to which Staplehouse donates all its profits. But trust us, this is not a charity project: It’s boundary-pushing food, served with genuine hospitality. Smith introduces Dixie staples like collards and benne seeds to new friends like vadouvan and furikake. His tasting menu and à la carte dishes—silky-smooth chicken liver topped with tart Meyer lemon jelly, fried-chicken skins with honey and whipped sauce, red snapper in fermented-shrimp broth—are technical and intricate, but the chef never sacrifices flavor for gimmickry. Staplehouse marks the next step in modern Southern cooking, and Smith is leading the pack as the movement’s brightest practitioner.